American Go E-Journal

THE LITTLE RED BOOK: For many, this volume of the Elementary Go Series (available from Kiseido and SmartGoBooks) was the book they were waiting for – the book that taught the West how to fight. Rarely a day goes by without someone responding to a query on KGS with the simple directive “Read Attack and Defense”. When your quizmaster did a poll on the best English-language go books, Akira Ishida and James Davies’ effort received many praises. 13 out of 17 of you read the position correctly. As for those who consult his joseki dictionary regularly, you are better players than your quizmaster, for you open your go books and do not simply look at the covers, but a look at the cover of “The Dictionary of Basic Joseki” will show that it was authored by Ishida Yoshio (and translated by John Power). For your information, the two “fors” in sentence one, four and five of this week’s column are for Roland Crowl, who pointed out my egregious grammatical error in last week’s question and missed by my editor. Congratulations to Reinhold Burger of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, this week’s winner, selected at random from those answering correctly.

THIS WEEK’S QUIZ: Speaking of polls, this week, in celebration of go’s prominent role on MTV’s Teen Wolf, as covered in the E-Journal, let’s hear from you on what you think is the best Western cultural reference to go. We will limit the answers to English language and it must be something featuring or mentioning go, but not directly about go or go instruction. And it needs to be original – so the obvious choice of Hikaru No Go does NOT qualify. I will judge the best response on such objective criteria as coolness, popularity, appropriateness and correctness of the reference. This can be books, TV, movies, advertising or news events. Click here to submit your nomination; I look forward to hearing from all of you.- Keith Arnold, HKA, EJ Quizmaster.